


Snapshots

by sobriquet



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-30
Updated: 2012-06-30
Packaged: 2017-11-08 22:04:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sobriquet/pseuds/sobriquet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm trying to write a short fic for each of the main Homestuck characters (roughly 24 at my current count, but that number may increase). Characters and relationships will be added to the tags as they become relevant.</p><p>Each chapter will be a different fic, meaning a different focus character. This multi-chapter format is just easier than uploading them all separately.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Vessels [Nepeta]

**Vessels**

Huntress by day, she stalks her own dreams. She is the girl with heart in mind and body in heart, mapping her current across the walls because she loves too much to hold it all in. Some days, she thinks her heart will burst with everything she crams inside it. In a dream she feels it pumping frantically, frenetically, until it expands beyond its cage and lies flightless and bare. 

But even to protect it she cannot, will not wear her heart on her sleeve. There will never be enough room, no matter how long the borrowed coat trails behind her. The coat is a shell, an embrace: the image of a valve billowing and contracting in the wind. It serves as the flag for her nation of one, furled around limbs crouched in wait, flown in the triumph of a successful hunt. When she catches her prey, she folds it into her flag for a heartbeat, a moment of wordless salute.

She feels for her prey, for everyone, just as much as for herself. Her heart is storage, brimming with bottled-up feelings that are not her own, in which she plays no part but spectator. She trails happiness, pursues desire, tracks down anger, foreign emotions scrawled in foreign blood along the walls. She lives through vicarious patchwork reenactments of an emotion that is not quite hers to remember. A love ancient, yet somehow new, lingers in the gaps in her history. She cannot miss what she never knew – and yet she pursues without knowing that she follows in footsteps, tracing the same path around the same heart that a different version of her once captured.


	2. Captain's Log [John]

**Captain’s Log**

Day 27  
ok, so, jade found these blank journals a couple of days ago, but she was kind of evasive about where so i'm pretty sure she took them from rose’s room. she's been exploring the planets a lot, since there isn’t much else to do here. she went out (in? on? i don’t even know) to lolar to find some food, and came back with these notebooks, grinning like some kind of furry elf. or whatever kind of fantasy creature would have dog ears. jade says we should keep track of our journey so we can tell the others about it when we meet up. sounds pretty dumb to me! i mean, who’d want to read about us hanging around on some boat for three years? maybe rose would, i guess. she’s kind of into that whole weird inner-dialogue self-reflective diary shit. well, fine. this is for you, rose. weird diary shit made to nonexistent order. knock yourself out.  
(p.s. sorry about your journals.)

Day 51  
well, this is exciting.

Day 66  
how are we even going to know three years have passed? there’s no day or night here. none of us have a watch. i don’t even know what fucking day it is!

Day 92  
i wonder if dave has a built-in clock or calendar or something, since he’s all timey. he almost deserves some super powers for putting up with wearing that stupid getup. or maybe you do, rose, since you’re the one who has to look at it. knight of time, pfffft. more like dork of time!

Day 120  
i’m still getting used to jade being part dog. i mean, i guess she was always kind of a furry in a way, but now she’s kind of a furry in a different, much weirder way. she barks in her sleep sometimes, and every once in a while she kind of spaces out, like she’s just seen a squirrel. but it is still pretty awesome getting to actually hang out with her, instead of just talking over the internet from a bunch of continents away. she’s actually willing to play my video games, which is smart of her because my games are the most rad games.  
  
dave ~~sprite~~ ’s a different deal altogether, since he isn’t really human anyway. or, i’m pretty sure he isn’t. and yeah, he’s dave, but he’s also a little bit not-dave sometimes. but he IS dave! ugh, i don’t even know anymore. i tried asking him a while ago, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. actually, he doesn’t really talk much at all. not to me, anyway. i think he and jade are getting pretty close. i wonder what dave will think when he sees how well they get along. other dave, i mean. or… argh. can a person be two different people at once? or be two different people who are actually the same person while technically only being one of them? or one different person from two… i’m giving myself a headache. remind me to ask you about this, rose. maybe it’ll be easier to accept in your incomprehensible psychobabble.

Day 153  
jade was talking in her sleep about fire hydrants. should i be concerned?

Day 198  
holy shit, rose. you are not gonna believe me but something interesting finally happened. at least, in comparison to the last however-the-fuck many boring days we’ve had here. so jade was messing around with her space powers, trying to do i don’t know what, and she accidentally monstrositified pretty much the entire population of crocs from lohac. oh my god rose, you should’ve seen her face! she started growling and sniffing and she basically looked exactly like an angry dog in big glasses, if that dog was wearing clothes and had ridiculously long hair. anyway, she actually started chasing down crocs, trying to catch them so she could send them back. i figured you’d like some evidence for research on, i dunno, the effects of animals on human sprites or whatever, so i alchemized a camera real quick and got a few shots. they’re kinda blurry cause she was running around barking her head off and i was laughing too hard to hold the camera steady. i’d have asked dave for some sweet aerial views, but he took wing at the first mad-dog signs. maybe he lied about his bird half and it’s actually a chicken.

Day 226  
i’ve rewatched all my movies at least three times, and don’t tell dave, but i’m starting to think they’re all a lot stupider than i remembered. i asked jade for a recommendation and she said something about a manthro chap movie but honestly i think i’d rather die of boredom first.

Day 314  
sorry about not writing much, rose. there hasn’t been much to tell. i’m not sure how i’m going to get you any big personal revelations or whatever when really all we’ve been doing is sitting around playing video games and stuff. i mean, it’s not bad, but i miss you and original dave, and doing adventure stuff. jade told me a bit about the dream bubbles, but they do not make a whole lot of sense. besides, my bubble dreams are not much more exciting than normal ones. i haven’t seen you guys at all yet, and it’s usually just me or trolls i don’t really know. i never expected dreaming to be so awkward! you’ve probably heard of weirder dreams, i’m sure, with all your psych textbooks and shit. maybe you can do that whole “tell me your dream and i’ll tell you what it means” thing when we meet up in a couple years. not that i’m promising to actually tell you anything. oh man, wouldn’t it be a great prank to make up some whole dream sequence that you’d completely misinterpret? like, i could tell you i’ve been having all these dreams about sailing through oceans of frog blood on a raft made of tadpoles, or finding a desert oasis with karkat except he’s in a bikini and only speaks japanese. watch out, rose, the pranking master is back in business! hehehe. 

Day 365  
happy birthday to me, i guess? i don’t know if it’s really been a year. plus we have cake around all the time since nanna bakes, like, even more than my dad did. if that’s even possible! but we had a whole stupid rube goldberg chain of screw-ups today, so that was interesting. jaspersprite started singing/meowing, which got jade all riled up, so jaspersprite got scared and took off running (flying?) and jade chased him. i tried to stop them, but it really just ended up being something like the lamest three-legged race in the world. hopefully you guys are keeping your composure a bit better on your meteor. i guess you are probably the champion there, since all you have for competition are trolls and dave.

Day 413  
rose, i think i’m starting to lose it. i actually miss my dad’s baking. i mean, i missed my dad before, which i guess isn’t a surprise because, hey, jack fucking murdered him. but i swear, for the last like two days i just keep remembering all those goddamn cakes he used to bake, and i don’t know why but i really want him back doing his thing. i think it’s legitimately been a couple years since i last saw my dad in the kitchen, plotting another way to shove cakes in my face when i walked unsuspecting around a corner. i can’t believe i ever resented him doing that. i think i’ve started to understand why he did it, and that he wasn’t just being some big dork about cake and stuff. he was just trying to show he cared, albeit in a really ass-backwards kind of way. that little revelation or whatever hit me a while ago and ever since, i’ve been wanting a cake from my dad like when i was little, or at least like before the game. and yeah, nanna bakes all the damn time, but it’s not the same. my dad did it differently, or maybe it’s just that it was my dad that made the difference. i don’t even give a shit anymore if it’s a betty crocker cake. fuck betty crocker, fuck her baking empire, and fuck this game and all the homicidal bastards in it. i just want my dad to be alive. i want him to be alive and here and if he’s peddling cake like some back-alley confections dealer, all the better. i want to be catered to like a… like a fat kid on baking-dad island, or something. man, even my metaphors are boring. this is going to be the longest goddamn three years in the history of unnaturally long groups of years. better call guinness records, rose, we got a fucking doozy on our hands.

Day 503  
ok, personal crisis resolved. sorry about that. man, i’m starting to get why karkat keeps ranting about how embarrassing his past self is. me from a hundred days ago is looking pretty dumb!

Day 612  
we’ve beat the ghostbusters game five times now. if i have to look at jade’s shitty furry character any longer i think i’ll gouge my eyes out. wasn’t there some old greek guy who did that? i remember you making some comment about a king who stabbed himself in the eyes. you were all smug about making the connection, too. i wish i could remember who it was so i could make some smart joke at jade about it. she’s been getting a lot better at sassy jokes lately. dave said he’s indoctrinating her to the court of coolkids, and jade said that made her the queen. sometimes i don’t even know what they mean anymore.

Day 658  
bluh bluh, huge ship.

Day 730  
one more year to go! i hope you guys are having fun on the meteor. ha ha ha, who am i kidding, you’re stuck with dave and a bunch of trolls. i bet it’s a complete zoo. not that it isn’t a legitimate zoo here, with all the crocs and turtles and everything, but… you know what i mean.

Day 799  
there are only so many days i can spend talking to salamanders and crocodiles and turtles. they are really not as smart as they all think. dave says i’m wasting my time trying to talk to them, but jade and i want to organize them all into a theater group or something. musical consorts! they all kind of suck at singing though. it’d be really funny, in that fantastically stupid ironic kind of way. we’re going to write a musical based on dave’s dumb comic as a bribe to get him to help. if things go well, we might even have a performance to show you guys.

Day 824  
things didn’t really go “well.” act one is a disaster, act two is a catastrophe, and act three is a literal trainwreck. i’ve never seen dave so proud.

Day 893  
i’m pretty sure jade and dave aren’t even speaking english anymore and have reverted to fluent sass. luckily, i was born to snark. the only downside is they’ve both managed to get their respective barks and caws pretty much under control, so i can’t hold those over them anymore. though i guess it’s good for them, as far as learning to control animal instincts goes. so there’s some more info for your hypothetical humanimal sprite research, rose. enjoy.

Day 907  
holy shit, did i seriously call them “humanimal sprites”? auuuuugh.

Day 940  
i think we’re finally getting into the home stretch. that huge freaky gray thing that was stretched out beside us is pretty much gone, or past, or whatever. i do not claim to understand the technical parts of this whole space-time travel shit. jade understands enough of it to know not to bother explaining it to me. she’s tried giving me the low-down in ghostbusters terms, but she is clearly woefully ignorant of how anything works in ghostbusters. i mean, seriously, rose, she still doesn’t get why crossing the streams is bad. she went on some whole science lecture spiel about space and portals and dimensions and i don’t even know where the hell she learned any of it, but she just does not get the point. streams are made to not be crossed. it’s just a movie, anyway. it’s not like i need everything spelled out for me in the language of one kinda silly movie from like thirty years ago.

Day 992  
it’s time for this whole space travel thing to be over. new session, here we come! in, what, thirty more days? jade’s still calculating for the exact day, or what constitutes as a day here. lots of math and space and science mumbo-jumbo she got from the lab on rose’s planet. lolar has turned out to be pretty useful, looks like, what with the journals and lab and everything. we explored all of our planets a lot, and rose’s and jade’s are definitely the most pleasant. i’ll be glad if i never have to go back on dave’s planet, though. if it’s anything like how hot it got in texas, i’m surprised dave lived long enough to play the game.

Day 1050  
ok, jade is figuring that we’ll take just over three full years, so probably 1,099 days by her count. we’re so close!

Day 1096  
three days to go. rose, please tell me you guys are as thrilled to see jade and dave (sprite) and me as i am to see you. it’s been three years, rose, three whole fucking years! and now we’re all finally going to see each other for real. i’ve gotten to know jade really well by now, and it has been a blast hanging out with her. but i’m so excited meet up with you and dave that i’m not sure i want to even admit how much this is going to be the best day of my life. no, fuck it, i will fully admit it. three days from now, we are going to bust through that window and all of us big dumb teenagers are going to be big damn heroes in the new session. i’ll give you the biggest bear hug you’ve ever had, and damn whatever composure you try to maintain. i owe dave the heartiest of bro fist hugs or whatever the hell he calls them, and karkat is undoubtedly due for his meeting with a friendship escalator. i’m pretty pumped about meeting the other trolls too, but you and dave are pretty much the light at the end of the tunnel right now.

Day 1097  
woah, i was kidding about the light at the end of the tunnel, but i think there really is one.

Day 1098  
well, here we go. this is our last day in the old session, and what’s left of our universe. we’re leaving our home behind. it didn’t really hit me until these last few days, but our whole universe is gone, rose. earth, the sun, mars, even wimpy little pluto – they’re all gone. and they were a frog. have i mentioned how weird that is? we all lived in a giant frog. that is pretty unbelievable. but now that frog is dead, and our home planet is gone, and we’re all traveling through space to some other reality to save our biological unrelated clone grandkids or something, and i feel like a character from some super-dramatic sci-fi movie. i just hope this one has an awesome ending!


End file.
